Heterodox Academy

• Name — Heterodox Academy • Abbreviation — HxA • Founders — Jonathan Haidt, Chris C. Martin, and Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz • Type — 501(c)(3) organization • Tax Id — 82-2903153 • Leader Title — President • Leader Name — John Tomasi • Leader Title2 — Interim Executive Director • Leader Name2 — Manon Loustaunau • Leader Name3 — Jonathan Haidt • Leader Title3 — Chair, Board of Directors • Location — New York City, U.S.

In 2011, Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, gave a talk at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in which he argued that American conservatives were underrepresented in social psychology and that this hinders research and damages the field's credibility. In 2014, along with political psychologist Philip Tetlock, social psychologist Lee Jussim and others, Haidt published the paper "Political diversity will improve social psychological science". In 2015, Haidt was contacted by Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz, a Georgetown University law professor, who had given a talk to the Federalist Society discussing a similar lack of conservatives in law and similarly argued that this undermines the quality of research and teaching. Haidt says he was also contacted by Chris Martin, a sociology graduate student who had published a similar paper about a lack of ideological diversity in sociology. Haidt, Martin, and Rosenkranz formed "Heterodox Academy" to address this issue. Initial funding for the group came from the Richard Lounsbery Foundation and The Achelis and Bodman Foundation. The Heterodox Academy website was launched with 25 members in September 2015. A series of campus freedom of speech controversies, such as those surrounding Erika Christakis at Yale University and the 2015–2016 University of Missouri protests, coincided with an increase in membership. Membership was initially open to tenured and pre-tenure professors, but has been expanded to a range of other faculty ranks (including career/full-time as well as adjunct/part-time), and non-faculty positions such as graduate students and postdoctoral researchers. Initially, the group had a selective membership application process which was partly intended to address imbalances toward any particular political ideology. In 2017, Heterodox Academy had about 800 total members. By 2018, about 1,500 professors had joined, along with a couple hundred graduate students. In 2018, Debra Mashek, a professor of psychology at Harvey Mudd College, was appointed as the executive director of Heterodox Academy. Mashek held the position until 2020, after which an interim executive director was appointed. In 2020, the organization had around 4,000 members. John Tomasi, a political philosopher at Brown University, became the first president of Heterodox Academy in 2022. As of 2023, total membership was approximately 5,000. As of 2025, it was 7,000 members.

In June 2018, Heterodox Academy held an inaugural Open Mind Conference in New York City, featuring several academic guests recently involved in campus free speech issues, like Robert Zimmer, Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Allison Stanger, Alice Dreger, and Heather Heying. The organization administers a "Campus Expression Survey", designed to allow professors and college administrators to survey their students' feelings about freedom of expression on campus. Heterodox Academy has advocated for institutional neutrality policies. In February 2024, Heterodox Academy, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the Academic Freedom Alliance "released a joint open letter calling for institutional neutrality". In March 2025, Heterodox Academy released a report tracking the adoption of institutional neutrality statements by colleges, which saw a significant increase after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, ensuing war and campus protests.